News

July 10, 2014

Pacific Cup 2014

I am providing commented routing results for a Cal40 and a Santa Cruz 50 here:
Routing for the Pacific Cup 2014.
You also find the link in the left column (look for the "New" label). You can of course always do it on your own by going to
Easy Routing.

March 4, 2014

Pacific Cup 2014

In preparation for this year's Pacific Cup race,
Cirrugator defaults for this race for more convenience in routing.

Like before, for the most easy routing simply go to the Cirrugator Easy Routing
site, select a boat and press the Go button.

Or for even easier routing download
CirrugatorDroid
as an app for your Android based smartphone/tablet (internet connection required).

You can get the routing optimzed for your boat by sending me your boat's polars. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me!

March 3, 2014

Animated Wind Map

The current global wind map gives a wonderful impression of the wind pattern
on small to large scale. Use your mouse to see other areas and change the scale.

I took a screenshot today (March 3, 2014), showing quite an unpleasant picture for sailing from CA to HI. I also started a routing for a Cal40 sailing the PCup route.
It estimated a not-so-bad time of 15 days. However, please note that the rounting is NOT just based on today's weather pattern! Instead,
the router uses the wind projections for the next 10 days, and determines the route which gets you to Hawaii the fastest, taking into account the changing
winds over the whole route!

Even if you could also plot the wind pattern for the next 10 days, and put it up in a stack, it does not seem to be possibel for a human mind to find the best path in this kind
of three-dimensional wind stack. But the computer can.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

March 3, 2014

March 8, 2014

March 16, 2014

March 17, 2014

routing done on March 3, 2014 for a Cal40 sailboat

June 25, 2013

Transpac 2013

In preparation for this year's Transpac race
,
Cirrugator defaults for this race for more convenience in routing.

July 16, 2012

Remember that you can still do the routing for yourself by going to
the Cirrugator Easy Routing
site, select a boat and press the Go button.

Or for even easier routing download
CirrugatorDroid
as an app for your Android based smartphone/tablet (internet connection required).

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me!

January 31, 2012

In preparation for this years's Pacific Cup, the router build into Cirrugator has been
made available as a simplified, stand-alone version as
Cirrugator Easy routing.
Hopefully it will contribute to understanding how to find the 'magic' route. Try it out!

April 2, 2008

October 20, 2007

Cirrugator has found a new home on its own website
www.cirrugator.com,
and on a new server, which gives the performance that was sometimes missing on the previous installation.

Try it out! Ulli

July 27, 2007

Cirrus on First Place!

... and Cirrugator was key in getting them there! Next boat was some 100 miles behind them! Here is an excerpt from the press release of the Transpac Organizers:

The final winner was Cirrus, a 34-year-old Standfast 40 in Aloha B class [...]

[Captain] Austin said at the dock, "We kind of came into this as an underdog. Ulli [Ulli Steiner, Myers' fellow nuclear physicist in Germany and longtime friend] wrote a weather tracking program [i.e. Cirrugator] for us. A couple of days into the race the program said to go south for 2 1/2 days. I didn't think that was the thing to do and we talked about it for a full day. Finally, I decided to go south as the program said, but for only 1 1/2 days. We weren't sure if that was the right thing to do but... Oh! Let me tell you how we found out it was the right move!

You can replay the race with Cirrugator all by yourself. All data are available online; look for the links to Cirrugator in the left panel.

Congratulation to the crew. Did they enjoy the victory? - I think the picture tells it all. Look for more info in the
blog.

Aloha, Ulli

About Cirrugator

Cirrugator is a web application designed for sailboat offshore racers.

It offers three key applications: position and performance tracking, race analysis
by incorporating historic data from other races,
and routing based on boat properties and weather forecast derived from grib files.

The boat properties are custom implemented and are specific for each boat.

As a modern web application Cirrugator is computer operating system independent, and can be run
just as well from
the web as from a local installation on a boat without any internet connection.
more...